IRU Vice President and President of the IRU Passenger Transport Council (CTP), Yves Mannaerts, stressed: “By adopting and making efforts to widely disseminate this Handbook to every single company and every single driver, we want to make a concrete contribution to enhancing road safety, by raising awareness and spreading best practices within our sector. In doing so, we intend to maintain the bus and coach industry’s leadership as a road safety champion among all transport modes”.

The Smart Move Road Safety Handbook focuses on three main issues: safe vehicle, safe driver and safe company. It invites bus and coach companies to sign a road safety charter, while providing drivers with a set of easy-to-use safety checklists. It also provides recommendations to policy decision-makers and manufacturers on making buses and coaches even safer.

Buses and coaches have remained the undisputable road safety champions among all road transport modes for many years. Statistics show that it is seven times safer to go to school by bus instead of the family car. In the European Union, buses and coaches have consistently shown excellent safety records, equal to that of trains, despite sharing the road with other, lesser-trained road users, thanks to industry initiatives to continually improve safety.

Doubling the use of buses and coaches in the EU alone is expected to reduce the number of fatalities on European roads by more than 1,500 per year. This figure could be improved further with more investments in safer infrastructure.

“To contribute even more to global efforts to improve road safety and in line with the objectives of the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety, the bus and coach industry, as represented by the IRU, has decided to make road safety the Smart Move top priority for 2013”, concluded Mr Mannaerts.